Wednesday, April 15, 2009

MST3K Is My Bag, Baby

A humble temp worker is shot into space by a mad scientist with plans for world domination. There, aboard his Satellite of Love, he and his robot creations are forced to watch bad movies as part of a nefarious experiment to determine which Z-grade stinkaroo will be rotten enough to force the masses into submission.

It's a Z-grade premise for a show about making fun of Z-grade films. The show? Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K for those with next to no lung capacity).

MST3K had a long TV run, cracking wise for about 10 years at the most godawful movies you wouldn't otherwise have seen. Heck, they even got to make a feature film!

But their time is done now. No more MST3K with Joel or Mike and their robot companions. Wait a minute. They're still going strong?

Rifftrax features Mike, Kevin, Bill and a variety of guests (Neil Patrick Harris, Chad Vader...) riffing all the popular movies they couldn't afford to do on TV, by recording mp3 audio you sync up to the dvd. A brilliant idea, and not as hard to do as it sounds. Weren't so crash on George's Star Wars prequels? Download the Rifftrax and you'll laugh your ass off from Trade Federation invasion to twin separation.

Cinematic Titanic is pretty much everyone else from the show riffin' it old school. Silhouettes in front of a movie screen.

As good as those are, there's still plenty of nostalgia the original format. Joel/Mike, Tom Servo and Croooooow! Huddled in the darkness of their own personal theater, in orbit hundreds of kilometers above the earth. Putting words into the mouthes of some pantywaste character or another. Or commenting on their actions, the plot, scenery. Ridiculing the hackneyed tropes.

Seems someone out there in YouTube land loved it so much they went to the effort of making new fun-sized episodes by inserting old riffs into new clips in all the right places. With ten years of riffs to choose from there's no shortage of zingers that fit and you'd be surprised just how well it comes off!